Still, there was more shocking news to come for a nation in mourning and under fire. The attack on Pearl Harbor was part of a coordinated plan.

At the same time men were dying on the mighty Arizona, Japan attacked Hong Kong, Malaya, Singapore, the Philippines. Within weeks, more than 220,000 Allied forces were taken prisoner, more than 31,000 wounded, more than 30,000 killed.

Joyce Roberts shakes off Dec. 7, 1941, like a bad dream. Then, sipping tea in her San Clemente home, she remembers every detail.

Roberts was 14 years old and living in Glendale with her mother and two sisters, having just fled Hong Kong.

The daughter of missionaries, Roberts was leaving church when people started asking, “Have you heard? Have you heard?”

Her mom switched on the radio. Pearl Harbor was all the news. But her dad, superintendent of the Hunan Bible Institute in China, was scheduled to fly out of Hong Kong that very day.

Where was her father? Was he alive?

To understand the sweep of the attacks on that day of infamy, it helps to go back further – a decade or so.

Sponsored by Biola University, her dad's 10-acre Bible Institute was in Changsha, the capital city of Hunan, a province in south-central China. Like other American missionary children in China, Roberts and her twin sister spoke Chinese before they spoke English.

These were years when China was opening up after being relatively closed for centuries. Refugees from Korea, Russia, Germany formed ethnic enclaves in Shanghai. And Changsha, an interior port off a branch of the Mississippi-like Yangtze River, was like a miniature Shanghai.

But Changsha's location coupled with a railroad also meant it was a strategic military site. One day, Roberts looked up and saw a plane with a big red dot on it. Cute, she thought.

Dozens of planes followed. Bombs dropped. The air raid siren failed. People panicked.

The Roberts family dived into trenches dug in a nearby cemetery.

Roberts, who taught nursing in India for 25 years before teaching at Saddleback College, calls that late summer day in 1937, “the beginning of the end.”

Japan's invasion of China tore apart the country, left cities and villages in ruins, shredded families. During the first of three battles for Changsha, it's reported that Japan's forces violated Geneva Protocol and used poison gas.

But with supply lines cut, Japan's forces retreated. And Roberts' father, Charles, now superintendent, continued his work at the Hunan Bible Institute.

Still, Roberts' parents realized it was time for their children to leave. By freighter and train, Roberts' 13-year-old brother was sent – alone – to boarding school in the United States.

Roberts, her twin and another sister were sent to Hong Kong. There, the girls lived with a Canadian woman on the Hong Kong peninsula of Kowloon and attended what was called Central British School, a school I attended in the mid-1960s when it was called King George the Fifth.

Yes, small world.

By the summer of 1941 things looked grim for the British colony. Roberts recalls Japanese troops swarming along Hong Kong's border. Winston Churchill flipped-flopped on what to do, first deciding against reinforcing the garrison then agreeing to 2,000 Canadian troops being sent.

Roberts remembers, “We had just left China to get away from the Japanese and here they were.”

The Crown announced some 20,000 women and children – non-Chinese – should be evacuated. Roberts' mother arrived by train. She shepherded her daughters aboard a steamer. Men slept outside on deck. Roberts, her sisters and her mother squeezed into the ship's library.

When the ship made a routine stop in Kobe, Japan, no one was allowed off, no reason given.

Few knew that Japan was preparing for its series of simultaneous attacks. Already, forces were amassing near Malaya and off the coast of the Philippines.

Less than eight hours after the attack on Pearl Harbor, 52,000 Japanese swept into Hong Kong.

The battle ended Christmas Day. Outnumbered four-to-one, more than 2,000 British troops died.

When Roberts' mother heard Hong Kong was under attack, she couldn't bear to talk about the war, not knowing if her husband was alive.

Finally, word arrived. Stuck in Changsha waiting for a visa, he never made it to Hong Kong.

Still, the superintendent refused to abandon his mission. He even secretly flew at night behind Japanese lines to pick up bales of cotton for Chinese uniforms.

But after several months, he realized what he was doing wasn't why he came to China. Now, his problem was escaping.

In Singapore and Malaya, Britain was prepared for a sea attack. Using bicycles and light vehicles, Japan attacked from the jungle.

Within two months, Japan took both Malaya and Singapore. The British-led numbers: 130,000 prisoners of war, more than 7,000 believed dead.

The Philippines fell after five months. Some 25,000 Americans and Filipinos had been killed, 100,000 taken prisoner.

It took Roberts' father nearly two years to make his way to the U.S., hitching a plane to Calcutta, catching a ship that took him around India, Africa, South America.

After World War II, Roberts' father returned to the Hunan Bible Institute. Civil war raged; Communists were winning. Roberts says of his mission, “It was not to be.”

In 1987, Roberts returned to China to visit her childhood home. Guards wouldn't let her past the gates. A decade later when China resumed control of the colony, Roberts visited Hong Kong to see the last British flag fly.

A thousand feet from where I boarded Hong Kong's Star Ferry to go to school, there remains a 35-foot-tall monument to British forces who fell in World War I and World War II.

In Chinese characters, the inscription reads, "May their martyred souls be immortal, and their noble spirits endure."

On the USS Arizona memorial in Pearl Harbor, the inscription reads, “To the memory of the gallant men here entombed and their shipmates who gave their lives in action.”

Different languages, different nationalities, one goal: Freedom.

David Whiting was born in Hong Kong, where he spent part of his childhood.

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